Indiana data hub powers efficiency, data-driven solutions

The state of Indiana is developing a data hub to improve data efficiency across government, track the state’s progress against key performance indicators and develop policy solutions.

Indiana’s Office of Management and Budget and Office of Technology will be working together to create the data management system. All state agencies will be required to provide data, system access or other requested resources to the project.

“Hoosiers can benefit from a comprehensive and coordinated effort by state agencies to share data and improve and strengthen services, maximize the utilization of available resources and ensure that state services are available to all Hoosiers,” said Indiana Governor Mike Pence in an executive order, signed in March.

“Centralized data sharing, correlation and analysis capacity will enable the state to achieve efficiencies in the administration of state programs and services to more effectively address public health, public safety and quality of life issues,” he added.

Today, not all state data reporting is automated, and reporting to OMB is quarterly, Chris Atkins, director of Indiana’s Office of Management and Budget and chief financial officer, told InformationWeek. “We want to make that as realtime as we can possibly make it,” he said. MPH will automate these processes and enable quicker access to data.

“A complex query that takes 10 minutes on an SQL server takes less than one second on our new in-memory computing platform," Sara Marshall, the MPH project director for OMB, told Governing.

It also will cost less to access the data, as the prior system did not have direct data sharing between two agencies, Marshall said. Instead, data from one agency had to go through a federal government repository and a third-party data-collection company before going to its final destination agency.

The MPH is powering the state’s new transparency site, launched in July, which lets the public better understand the government’s spending, budget, operations, goals and progress. But the first priority for the use of MPH is to provide statistical analysis of Indiana’s infant mortality rate, which is above the U.S. average.

“Governor [Mike] Pence is a firm believer in data-driven decision making and has challenged us to pull all agency resources and data to examine this problem in ways no government entity has ever done,” said Atkins in a statement. He noted that MPH would sort through multiple agencies’ data and parse more than 50 data sets.

According to a report in the IndyStar, State Rep. Ed DeLaney (D-Indianapolis) hopes the hub will give the legislature better financial information for comparing the budget it passes with the spending that actually occurs. “Our ability to monitor what the governor does could be improved if this is transparent,” DeLaney said.

Several initiatives are underway across the country to improve data access. Ohio is spending $62 million to consolidate legacy information technology systems across its state government agencies. The project will centralize about 9,000 servers and 30 smaller data centers across 26 state agencies and is estimated to save $150 million.

Last month Fort Worth, Texas’s open data website, data.fortworthtexas.gov, went public. Based on the Socrata platform, the site has certificates of occupancy, development and residential permits and other data sets available for download in several formats, including Excel, PDF, JSON and XML.